If you’ve ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you’ve written), you’ve been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

I recently got an advance look at the latest version of a tool that helps bring SEO to the masses. InboundWriter, a web-based software-as-a-service offering, coaches bloggers and other writers for the web on how to tweak their content based on best practices tuned to the user's site strategy. The latest version, due out next week, adds a feature that tracks topics on Twitter to find similar material—giving bloggers potential new sources, and marketers an eye on their competition.

Whether giving the masses the power of SEO is a good thing or not is another question entirely—while InboundWriter can optimize pages for search, following its advice to the letter doesn't make you a better writer (though the new Twitter research tool certainly can make you a better-informed one). But like the honey badger, Google doesn't care if you're no Raymond Carver. To get a feel for what SEO experts think determines a "high-quality" page from the standpoint of a search engine, I used InboundWriter to search-optimize this story. I'll let you be the judge of the outcome; InboundWriter gave it a score of 99 out of a possible 100.

Beware of the Panda

In a perfect world, well-written and insightful articles, blogs, and other web content would rise to the top of a search page, lifted meritoriously above the less relevant trash. But in the real world, pages rise and fall based on algorithms. At the same time that web marketers and get-rich-on-the-Internet-quick schemers are constantly trying new ways to game Google’s search algorithms and get to the top of the "organic" results, Google is constantly changing the rules of the game in an attempt to screen out "low-quality" content. Since Google introduced its "Panda" algorithms in February 2011 in an effort to stop "link farming," there have been at least 9 major updates to them, and many other tweaks to how Google's search works.

Just how one writes what would be a "high-quality" page in Google's algorithmic eyes is constantly subject to change—and often has nothing to do with how people would judge content quality. At some organizations where SEO has been institutionalized (including a few I've worked at), the optimization of content for search is a separate process from the production of the content itself, which can lead to some embarrassing and clumsy content. Bloggers and small businesses doing their own websites are, at best, left to cribbing notes from SEO sites and other sources to pull together their best practices of the moment—until the rules change again.

Hands on

InBound Writer is essentially a web-based SEO coaching system. There are two ways to use the service: through InboundWriter’s own web portal, or as a WordPress plugin. Either way, the service is free for optimization of up to 8 documents a month; beyond that, it carries a $20 a month fee, with additional "enterprise" licensing options available that add features such as team workflow.

The starting point to a 99 percent perfectly SEO'd story.

Sean Gallagher

When you’re starting off from scratch with InboundWriter, you’re presented with your text editing space and a "Topic Research" box, as shown below. Topic Research performs an analysis of articles, blogs and other websites related to the targeted topics for your article. Jay McCarthy, InboundWriter’s vice president of marketing, says the research tool goes out to "the social web, and pulls thousands of articles" from blogs and other sites. Using server-based natural language processing, the service then finds and extracts the most relevant keywords, and ranks them based on the type of search optimization strategy you choose.

You can either write based on up to three terms that you enter to describe what you’re writing about, or just start writing; once you hit 200 words, the software will allow you to choose to let it research keywords for you automatically.

Once you run the term research, InboundWriter generates a set of relevant search terms—including a 0-to-5 star rating of their effectiveness—and it keeps track of how many times you use them in the text of your content. It also tracks your content’s "focus terms"—keywords you use five or more times, which Google and other search engines will then use to determine the relevance of the document to the topic.

As you start to enter text, InboundWriter will also start providing an overall score for your document, as well as tips on how to improve the score—for example, using keywords more consistently to get more focus terms.

That score, and the tips, are based on three "strategy" settings that can be configured for every document through menus launched from the left side of the page. The "Search and Social" strategy, as shown below, configures the set of rules applied against the page based on whether you’re shooting for search popularity (by using more commonly used search terms to boost the probability your page will come up in search results), or to minimize search competition (using less-commonly used terms that will make sure people looking for a specific keyword will find you without finding your competitors), or a balance between the two. InboundWriter will re-rank the keywords in its list in terms of importance based on the strategy, and shift the recommendations for improvement that the service makes based on the changes.

Setting search strategy determines how keywords are weighted—to be popular, or to stand out in a crowd.

Sean Gallagher

For example, when I set the search strategy for this article to "Minimize Search Competition", InboundWriter suggested using the term "SEO" less, since it was not as highly ranked to minimize the number of competitive results of a search, and instead emphasize something like "social web" or "relevant keywords."

An optimized article would mean working "social web" and "relevant keywords" into this story five times. This is why you might run across web pages that seem to gratuitously use "social web" and "relevant keywords," even when they don’t seem to have anything to do with what the page is about. Which would make "relevant keywords" irrelevant.

You can also configure the "advertising strategy" for your content. If you’re using Google AdSense to present context-sensitive ads alongside or within your content, selecting this strategy will prompt the service to check against third-party sites to find which keywords related to your topic have the highest cost-per-click. McCarthy said that InboundWriter "hits third-party APIs for the competitiveness and CPC value for terms." Depending on what degree you decided AdSense is important to your advertising strategy—very, somewhat, or not at all—InboundWriter re-ranks keywords to get the desired level of advertising impact.

Setting Google AdSense's importance in InboundWriter.

Sean Gallagher

Exactly what is the reading level of your audience?

The last strategy setting taken into account by InboundWriter is "reader targeting." Using analysis of the vocabulary and grammar of your content, the service will assess the document based on how well it matches the target educational level of the audience, and make recommendations about adjustment. For example, if I decided this story was targeted at elementary school students, InboundWriter will advise me that the content is "too sophisticated" for that target audience in the "Steps to Improve My Score" box, as shown here.

Sensing the buzz

Beating the search engines senseless with keywords is all well and good, but it doesn’t actually help writers do research before they start producing content. That’s where InboundWriter’s latest feature comes in. Called "Buzz", this piece of the web service uses the natural language processing used to research keywords to keep track of what other people are saying about the topics you’ve written about—by mining Twitter. McCarthy says that this same capability can and will be applied to other social networks in the future.

Checking the Buzz on hybrids.

Sean Gallagher

Unlike some Twitter-tracking services, such as Salesforce.com’s Radian6, InboundWriter’s Buzz is less concerned with what people say in their tweets as what they link to. It keys in on the keywords in the tweets themselves, and then follows shared links, tracking the terms they use and how frequently they’re mentioned by Twitter users (using a scale of chili peppers to display their degree of "hotness"), what hashtags are used with the stories on Twitter, and who promoted them.

This can be useful if you’re a blogger and looking for related content to link to, or to get a feeling for what stories are getting the most attention in the Twitterverse. Buzz scans the entire public Twitter feed, and not just the people you choose to follow, so it can dig much deeper.

There’s a competitive analysis spin to Buzz as well—the information gleaned from the Twitter mining can be used to tailor and promote your own content on social media. "If I’m a beat writer, focused on skincare products," McCarthy said, "I can see who I’m competing with for content. It gives me an idea on what sort of unique take I want to take, and trends that pop up. When there are hashtags, I’ll see those, so I can see what tags a competitor is putting on content and use them."

How the sausages are made

Admittedly, as someone who is a professional writer and has helped small businesses set up blogs, there are a few things that are attractive to me about InboundWriter, and a few things that just totally rub me the wrong way. Just like the Internet it is served across, InboundWriter is just an information source, and it can be used for good or evil.

The Twitter-tracking, which was not fully operational when I tested the product, could by itself be worth a $20 a month fee to highly-focused bloggers and marketers trying to catch the next hot hashtag. The audience targeting analytics could help coax people to adjust their writing to better suit their target audience. But the one thing that InboundWriter doesn’t do is keep you from being a crappy writer in the first place.

McCarthy admitted that perhaps aiming to hit the highest possible score against InboundWriter's metrics wasn't a best practice in itself. He suggested that customers using the software may want to set a target for writers to hit between 60 and 70 for their content, rather than over-gaming the search engines and sacrificing readability. And after all, at the end of the day, the quality of content isn't judged by Google's Panda algorithm—it's judged by the impression human beings have of the site after they've read it. Social web. Relevant keywords.

SEO is a market where potential profit is quickly converging to zero. As Google's algorithms get better, they become more difficult to manipulate. As CMS systems improve, more and more keyword management is baked in to the system to the point where you start to see diminishing returns very quickly.

In short, SEO is quickly becoming simply market research and ad-spend management; both of which existed before the Internet. Admittedly, the techniques have changed, and the tools have changed accordingly, but what they're selling are just market survey results and some basic conjoint analysis. Most of these techniques would be the same regardless of whether you were advertising on the internet or on radio/TV.

SEO is a market where potential profit is quickly converging to zero. As Google's algorithms get better, they become more difficult to manipulate. As CMS systems improve, more and more keyword management is baked in to the system to the point where you start to see diminishing returns very quickly.

In short, SEO is quickly becoming simply market research and ad-spend management; both of which existed before the Internet. Admittedly, the techniques have changed, and the tools have changed accordingly, but what they're selling are just market survey results and some basic conjoint analysis. Most of these techniques would be the same regardless of whether you were advertising on the internet or on radio/TV.

I believe that's why the InboundWriter folks are starting to shift to more of a social network focus, with hashtag research and all that—optimizing for search engines themselves isn't paying off anymore, whereas getting linked through social media creates much more traffic and ups search visibility.That is, if you use the research the right way. Otherwise, you're just a spamming moron.

SEO is a market where potential profit is quickly converging to zero. As Google's algorithms get better, they become more difficult to manipulate. As CMS systems improve, more and more keyword management is baked in to the system to the point where you start to see diminishing returns very quickly.

As someone who does SEO and web design for a living I can assure you it isn't about producing spam, and it isn't going away any time soon. The old tricks of just filling your pages with keywords or paying some shady offshore company to link to you from 100 near identical "infinite monkey" websites don't work any more, but you always had to be a bit of a douche to use those tactics anyway. Good riddance. At best all you did was alienate your visitors.

The SEO which still works is closer to the actual definition. Structure your website to make your pages easy for both humans and machines to understand. Target pages to a single well defined topic. Write good content so decent writers on relevant websites/blogs will link to your pages.

Most of it is a case of just being aware of SEO during design and writing rather than dirty tricks, and that seems to be what this tool helps with (I haven't used it yet). A score of 0% would presumably mean your writing is off topic and without any focus (bad regardless of the SEO viewpoint) and a score of 100% would be unreadable spam. As the company itself said; something in the middle suggests well focused and relevant, but still readable.

After all, Google's algorithms are trying to find content which is relevant and interesting. The best way to optimise for that is to be relevant and interesting.

The SEO which still works is closer to the actual definition. Structure your website to make your pages easy for both humans and machines to understand. Target pages to a single well defined topic. Write good content so decent writers on relevant websites/blogs will link to your pages.

Most of it is a case of just being aware of SEO during design and writing rather than dirty tricks, and that seems to be what this tool helps with (I haven't used it yet). A score of 0% would presumably mean your writing is off topic and without any focus (bad regardless of the SEO viewpoint) and a score of 100% would be unreadable spam. As the company itself said; something in the middle suggests well focused and relevant, but still readable.

After all, Google's algorithms are trying to find content which is relevant and interesting. The best way to optimise for that is to be relevant and interesting.

I agree; the SEO that works is making content relevant and interesting... but then you're just creating content. How long before the content creators figure this out and roll it into their content creation process (either through something that runs on top of their CMS or as a standalone step in the editing process)? That's why I argue that SEO will go away; the techniques may persist but as they become easier to use, SEO as a service becomes more about the research and aggregation of data (again, closer to traditional market research than anything) than actual implementation.

I believe that's why the InboundWriter folks are starting to shift to more of a social network focus, with hashtag research and all that—optimizing for search engines themselves isn't paying off anymore, whereas getting linked through social media creates much more traffic and ups search visibility.That is, if you use the research the right way. Otherwise, you're just a spamming moron.

Right, but the way you do this is fundamentally no different than traditional word of mouth advertising; it just has a bigger impression rate because you can tell a lot of people so quickly. You make content that is genuinely interesting to people, enable them to share it socially, and do branding/market focus through hashtags.

In my opinion, a better way to go is through "rainmakers," or those people whose opinion on a certain topic is so relevant that many people will listen and re-share that content. There's a built in anti-spam check here: if an influential person passes along too much uninteresting content (or even too much content in general,) they start to lose their influence. In the end, this is not really any different than traditional web advertising, except instead of paying $0.01 per impression for 500,000 impressions on a website, you pay someone with 500,000 followers $5000 to share a link if they agree on the content. But the advertisement would be less obvious, less intrusive, and hopefully genuinely interesting to someone who would click on it.

I would have spit whatever I could have been drinking at the time all over the monitor when I read that last line... if I had been drinking something.

Also, this paragraph was pretty amusing:

"An optimized article would mean working "social web" and "relevant keywords" into this story five times. This is why you might run across web pages that seem to gratuitously use "social web" and "relevant keywords," even when they don’t seem to have anything to do with what the page is about. Which would make "relevant keywords" irrelevant. "

The tool discussed in the article does not understand HTML. In short, as far as I can tell it is useless for the websites I work with. No html also means no <h1> detection, no <img alt="" detection, no <meta name="description" detection, and so on.

I imagine it could be valuable for feature articles like this one, but if you look around most of the web does not consist of articles like that.

The things I've enjoyed online, have either come to me as word-of-mouth directly from my friends, family or co-workers, or that I've found on my own looking for a specific topic.

The only thing I've seen most SEO accomplish, is to get totally unrelated sites (that waste my time) for a subject I am researching posted higher in search results. If I am researching an author, I don't want every freaking SEO'd first and second hand bookstore from Malaysia to Nairobi showing up in the first page of results.

That's what bugs me about SEO, it's about as scummy as being an employee of AT&T.

The things I've enjoyed online, have either come to me as word-of-mouth directly from my friends, family or co-workers, or that I've found on my own looking for a specific topic.

The only thing I've seen most SEO accomplish, is to get totally unrelated sites (that waste my time) for a subject I am researching posted higher in search results. If I am researching an author, I don't want every freaking SEO'd first and second hand bookstore from Malaysia to Nairobi showing up in the first page of results.

That's what bugs me about SEO, it's about as scummy as being an employee of AT&T.

I'm from Malaysia and I understand your feeling. I really hate how SEO are being abused. As if these day there is not only forum posting / comment posting bot, but blog creating bot as well.

EDIT:

I felt like there is a software that take an username / password and a database of data (including links) and will generate bogus blog just to generate links. Sigh.

Wow, what a great advertorial, although you forgot to mark it as such. Half expected an affiliate link at the end.

I work for one of the big search agencies out there. This article is a joke. You might want to mention all the posts on Googles new efforts to penalize over optimized sites like those produced by this subscription service. BTW, in the affiliate scene, services like these are a dime a dozen. The goal is to provide publicly available info matched up against so quality algorithms and then charge a fat monthly fee for it.

Wow, what a great advertorial, although you forgot to mark it as such. Half expected an affiliate link at the end.

I work for one of the big search agencies out there. This article is a joke. You might want to mention all the posts on Googles new efforts to penalize over optimized sites like those produced by this subscription service. BTW, in the affiliate scene, services like these are a dime a dozen. The goal is to provide publicly available info matched up against so quality algorithms and then charge a fat monthly fee for it.

After reading everyone's comments it's clear that the SEO bend strikes a nerve. You may be surprised that it does for us as well. In fact we don't think of ourselves as an SEO tool at all. Our goal is to provide a product that helps writers of online content achieve visibility, engagement, and ultimately make more money with their content. We do not see this as an SEO challenge although some SEO best practices may be needed to achieve this.

Our goal has always been to bring the writer into the fold because they are where the creativity lives and where great content begins. The reality is though that the Google Index has tripled in size in the last 2 years (see worldwidewebsize.com) and that trend means that being found even with better search algorithms is getting harder. So doing the absolute basics like using terms that people are actually looking for or making sure your writing is structured to ensure proper emphasis of your topic is not only good SEO but generally a good thing to do.

Just to be absolutely clear, we want people to create better content first and foremost, but a writer should have at their disposal information which can help them achieve their goals for that content. The creativity starts and stops with the writer. We just make sure that the writer is well informed along the way.

100% does not mean you're over optimized. We do in fact have rules that will actually penalize your score if you do things like try to stuff keywords. If your content is written well and achieves a 90 or 100 then go with it, what I have advocated is not letting the score force you to produce bad writing. It's far better to have a well written article with a score of 70 than an ugly spammy looking article which scores better. The score is just meant to show you how well you are following best practices and achieving the goals you've defined.

SEO is not a single activity but a process which includes keyword research, writing copy and analysis among others.

If the naysayers believe that finding the terms that potential customers search for, returning targeted and relevant content which is found when they search and answers the questions the searcher initially had in their minds when they started the search, constitutes spam then so be it!

Writing good content is an art and not all of us are experts but can get by relatively successfully and just as we use tools to help identify focus keywords other tools that can help with the copywriting process are not inherently bad. Anyone can stuff keywords as much as the want but as we all know that doesn't work in the long run as proof of the pudding is in the eating or in this case in the conversion rate. Even without the Panda!

Even good and relevant content might not be successful content. Reading age analysis is just one of the elements that a good writer needs to keep in mind as even the most relevant content might not hit the target if not easily consumed.

Of course, tools are only that and can be abused but invariably adopting that approach is a short-term one and will prove to be an unsuccessful route to follow. It is how you use it that is important.

I never paid a dime for SEO above and beyond what my hosts (SBI) offer as part of their package. They give a module that helps you find keywords, you then write good quality content about those keywords. There's then a brief checking step to make sure you've not over-cooked anything and that's that. Anything more than that's always going to lose long-term as the engines improve their ranking criteria.

I'm doing pretty well for a 1 man site too, ranking near the top for my major keywords and Panda (Googles recent re-vamp) didn't affect me at all.